A social media strategy summarizes everything you want to do and achieve via social media.
It is a blueprint with the answers to “what, how, why, and when” for your social media content. This strategy guides everything your church does on social media and shows you your success rate.
For your social media strategy to be effective, it should cater to your audience’s interest in connecting with your church outside its four walls. It must also help you to achieve your church communication objectives.
Church Social Media Strategy Explained
Before we go ahead, we should explain the idea of a church social media strategy. This strategy is a major part of your church communication plan and it should drive towards engaging new and existing social media followers. It goes beyond just posting on social media or having a social media outreach.
Your church social media strategy should have these two goals at least:
- Reach new followers.
- Engage existing followers better.
With this out of the way, we can now discuss how to create a social media strategy for your church.
Creating a Social Media Strategy for Your Church
Jesus Christ isn’t on social media, but you are. You can use this tool to spread the good news and encourage believers in their walk with God. Social media shouldn’t be for just advertising your church, you do so much more with it. Below are helpful tips to create a social media strategy for your church:
Know your target audience
Knowing your target audience is one of the most important steps of creating a social media strategy. Everything that you do on social media should focus on how to engage your target audience. Don’t forget that your social media channels aren’t just for reaching your church members. What you post will reach followers that don’t attend your church and followers of everyone that shares your content.
Everything that you share should meet the needs of this target audience, help them grow, and spur engagement. Knowing your target audience helps you to figure out several aspects of your social media strategy.
Choose your focus topics
You don’t need to go into specific details here, all you need is broad topics of interest that you want to focus on. The idea is to pick out focus topics for the duration that the strategy covers. Knowing your broad topics saves you from sharing one topic over and over or chasing multiple topics without focus.
There are so many ideas to consider for a church such as:
- Sermon excerpts
- Articles
- Scripture verses
- Prayer requests
- Questions of the day
- Book recommendations
- Church events
- Quotes from your pastor and other theologians
- Volunteer stories
When choosing your focus topics, ensure that they are what your audience wants to hear or read about. As such, you must carry out a survey to discover your target audience’s needs.
Choose your social media channel
The channel that you choose depends on your target audience, how you engage with them, and your kind of content. Emails and Facebook are perfect for engaging baby boomers and millennials. However, for Gen Zs, you may want to opt for Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok.
About 84 percent of churches already have Facebook pages. The advantages of Facebook include:
- Facebook pages pop up on Google search.
- It is the most popular of all the social media channels.
- You can reach the feed of your audience directly.
Twitter is also a very popular social media channel even though just 16 percent of churches are on this platform. There are a few reasons why you should consider Twitter for your church including:
- Over 145 million daily users.
- Twitter users spend about 26 percent more time viewing ads than users of social media platforms.
Another important social media channel is Instagram. Interestingly, only 13 percent of churches are taking advantage of this platform. Here’s why you should set up an Instagram account for your church:
- There are about 800 million active users on Instagram monthly.
- About 75 percent of all Instagram users fall between 18 and 24 years old making it perfect for reaching the younger generation.
We advise that you don’t rush into using all the platforms at the same time. Learn the ropes of each channel before you start using them. Encourage your followers, especially church members to share your content.
Create a posting calendar
Great job, you know your target audience, focus topics, and the platforms to use. It is time to create a posting calendar. This calendar shows you how many times you will be posting per week.
Contrary to popular opinion, you don’t have to post daily. However, you need to be consistent with your schedule. To make it easy for you to be consistent, you can schedule your posts using a church app like ChurchPad. Schedule your posts ahead of time once a week and go about your business.
Conclusion
A social media strategy helps you to achieve a lot more with social media. We have shown you a few things to do to create a social media strategy in this post. Remember to check out the features of ChurchPad for your church communication needs.